Officer John Falcone's funeral: Community braces for huge crowd

Feb. 22, 2011

Written by

Larry Hertz

Poughkeepsie Journal

CARMEL, Putnam County — The church where slain City of Poughkeepsie police Officer John Falcone's funeral will be held Thursday has a capacity of about 650.

Law enforcement officials were busy Tuesday making plans to accommodate more than 10 times that number expected to show up in this town of about 35,000 for the 10 a.m. Mass, which New York Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan will officiate.

Thomas Hess, funeral director at the Cargain Funeral Home, which is handling the arrangements, said the community has coped with a large funeral crowd before. Hess said nearly 2,000 people attended services for Matthew Lamb, a Carmel emergency medical technician who was killed in the line of duty in 2007.

Hess said most police officers who attend Falcone's funeral would be lined up outside the church on the main thoroughfare, Route 52.

Joseph Zwilling, New York Archdiocese spokesman, said a City of Poughkeepsie priest contacted Dolan hours after Falcone died Friday and asked him to handle the funeral. The archbishop quickly agreed to do it.

"It's a sad duty but one that previous New York archbishops have carried out, and Archbishop Dolan is proud to carry on that tradition," Zwilling said.

Since becoming archbishop in 2009, Dolan has officiated at one other such funeral, for a firefighter in Yonkers in 2010, Zwilling said.